A compelling piece of modern music theater, made more so by Peter Sellars' stark, stylized production. The vocal lines took on a hallucinatory power as sung by the radiant yet intense soprano Dawn Upshaw as Xirgu, the smoky-voiced mezzo Kelley O'Connor as Lorca and the silvery soprano Jessica Rivera as Xirgu's student, Nuria. A Greek chorus of eight black-clad women commented on the action as if it had stepped out of one of Lorca's own plays. The show drew visual strength from a hand-painted backdrop (by the Los Angeles designer who calls himself, simply, Gronk) that echoed the fiery Cubist violence of Picasso's "Guernica."